Psycho Bunny re-launched. Then they went viral. Here’s how Shopify helped get them there.
The story of Psycho Bunny is one of transformation paired with a healthy dose of rapid growth.
Founded in 2005 as a groovy necktie company operating mostly via wholesale, the brand was refounded in 2016 as a high-end clothing retailer with a direct-to-consumer model. Early signs from a partnership in Panama indicated that a brick-and-mortar operation could have replicable success in the United States. Their mission became spinning carefully sourced Peruvian cotton into the world’s most comfortable and stylish polo, and selling it globally.
Launching this second chapter from a small space with a limited team, Psycho Bunny now has almost 1,000 employees and more than 90 stores. The brand has expanded into multiple lifestyle categories, helping to dress the world from early childhood to adulthood, and for every occasion.
Shopify has been Psycho Bunny’s platform of choice for pivoting, scaling, and continually innovating as Shopify itself does exactly the same.
“It’s been a true partnership,” says Jean-Aymeri de Magistris, vice president of IT, data and analytics, and PMO at Psycho Bunny. “We grew in tune with Shopify. As fast as we needed new features, Shopify accommodated us. We grew together.”
On Shopify, Psycho Bunny has:
- Grown from 7 to nearly 1,000 employees
- Used Shopify POS to expand to more than 90 stores
- Seen a positive uplift in conversion rates
- Expanded internationally to Canada, with operating partners in Latam, Japan, Dubai, and South Africa with brick-and-mortar stores
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The challenge: Overhauling a brand and scaling rapidly
There are a lot of challenges when you’re reinventing your brand from the ground up. Psycho Bunny faced them all head-on.
Says Jean-Aymeri of that time, “We were mostly in polo and T-shirts to start. We were in a few wholesale accounts but not really positioned the way we wanted. So we took the polo and we expanded categories.”
With a team of just seven people, they needed a technology partner that would do more than provide access to a platform. They needed dedicated support services to act as an extension of their team. If things went right for them, they’d need a reliable platform they could rapidly scale on. And to create that rapid growth, they needed a partner with an innovative mindset, who was always one step ahead of those needs.
Unfortunately, that’s not what they found on Magento (now Adobe Commerce), their original platform—but that didn’t stop them for long.
“We deplatformed from Magento almost immediately,” Jean-Aymeri. “We already knew we would win on ecommerce with Shopify. At the time we had no plans of a retail expansion, we were just trying to grow online. Shopify was the clear winner from the onset.”
The solution: A reliable, feature-rich platform that grows along with you
A platform to scale on, with unified solutions for wherever customers shop
Jean-Aymeri and team picked Shopify as a platform to scale on.
We saw that Shopify was simple and nimble and we could operate with a small team and test a lot of strategies or technologies at low cost. The app and partnership ecosystem is strong and we felt it was the right choice to help us grow quickly and at low cost.
Not only did Shopify have a reputation as a reliable technical partner in handling growth, but we were also the perceived leader in ecommerce, which is where the Psycho Bunny team knew they wanted to begin.
But they also knew that once they began opening stores, they’d need a unified stack. And they knew for both channels, they wanted their solutions to be simple, so they could maintain the same team to support it.
That’s exactly what the team found in Shopify POS, which they’ve used to support their brick-and-mortar growth: a single POS that plugs directly into the rest of their platform for a completely unified experience that empowers them to cover fulfillment seamlessly.
“We capitalized on the opportunity and the way the Shopify hardware store is built, all the ecosystem that's there at our fingertips to buy products, to POS, stands, printers... It's just very simple, from decision to action, to set up a new store.”
A little help from friends
The need to maintain a small team was another key in their Shopify solution: the support offered by their success managers who operated like an extension of their team.
The Psycho Bunny team appreciated, for instance, the central role that Shopify POS played in their unified commerce solution as they leaned hard into their brick-and-mortar expansion. However, there were a few desired features they wanted to build into it, including a better way to measure store and staff KPIs.
No worries. The team simply talked to their success manager, who linked them up with Riess Group, a Shopify partner agency that specializes in omnichannel solutions for brands such as Magnolia, Levi’s, Lalique, and Saje.
The Riess Group helped them customize Shopify POS to provide a better solution for receiptless returns and a centralized dashboard for tracking store and employee performance.
Says agency owner, Mike Riess, “The Psycho Bunny team are really sharp and nimble, and want to take advantage of technology to maximize their store’s performance. With Shopify POS’s extensibility, we were able to offer them this additional visibility all inside of Shopify’s platform. The staff KPI app allows their team to see how each location and team member is performing in real time. This helps them coach team members to maximize in store revenue and customer experience.”
These features have helped make Psycho Bunny’s POS rollout a success, allowing them not only to grow but also to optimize that growth.
“Our success managers over the years have really become extended members of the team,” says Jean-Aymeri. “The reality is that the customer success managers play a huge role in our day-to-day operation. They put us in front of product managers and subject matter experts who tackle everything that we have as a problem.”
The quality of the support and the ease of navigating and using the platform and the product have been unparalleled. I’ve been in the space for a long time now and I can confidently say that Shopify has a true edge there. The legacy players often approach this relationship in a more transactional way and that’s not the approach we have with Shopify.
The results: Rapid scaling followed by steady expansion
Success in scaling
The Psycho Bunny brand has flourished with viral success since their relaunch—and they’ve done it on and with Shopify.
“We were very clear that we wanted to grow,” says Jean-Aymeri. “Shopify put product owners in front of us to give us visibility on the roadmap and on what they were thinking for the future. Every time we grew, Shopify was very deliberate to add capabilities and features in the area that mattered in our journey.”
I can confidently say, because I speak from my own perspective, that you can grow from a small idea to a full enterprise retailer under Shopify.
Shopify was also there for the team as they began to open more brick-and-mortar stores, not only helping them to create a unified shopping and fulfillment experience, but also providing back-end data that would help them make decisions on where to go next.
“We just went where our clients wanted us to go,” says Jean-Aymeri. “We chose the [Shopify] retail POS because it was easy to test and deploy. We wanted a unified stack from the beginning, so leveraging the retail POS was the natural way to test and learn before we committed to something else or to more leases. The retail POS is so easy to learn under Shopify so that helped us open stores during COVID when we couldn’t travel in the US.”
The importance of the unified platform can’t be understated.
“Consolidating the commerce stack was very important so we could pivot and adapt to market forces and keep moving toward our growth goals.”
The Psycho Bunny brand has continually seen a positive uplift in conversion since joining Shopify, even as—and in some cases, because—they implement new features.
"We just migrated to the new checkout,” says Jean-Aymeri, “and we're seeing some very early signaling that it's working really, really well."
A plug and play app ecosystem
The Psycho Bunny team was also excited to dig in with Shopify’s app ecosystem, which they knew they could use to easily extend their capabilities and pivot to new offerings. Implementing new functionality can be time-intensive and costly on other platforms, but through Shopify's ecosystem, it's plug and play.
When looking for a new app, the Psycho Bunny team shops around, giving chosen apps trial runs and seeking customer validation before investing further–all with very little developer time invested.
“That's really helpful for us to grow. You get to pivot to market forces. You get to try to capitalize on opportunities… Shopify is a really good enabler for that.”
A platform that keeps pace with Psycho Bunny’s own pace of innovation
From the start, Psycho Bunny has been attracted to Shopify’s culture of innovation. Not only does it mirror their own, but it’s also critical to their own ability to pivot quickly with their customers and rapidly grow.
“That’s one of the main reasons we are with Shopify,” says Jean-Aymeri. “The fact that Shopify innovates and updates the platform constantly gives us a competitive advantage. Shopify has worked with us along the way on our different milestones.”
What’s more, having Shopify means that Psycho Bunny can keep their tech team lean and efficient.
“I don't need to have a dozen engineers working on custom solutions for me,” says Jean-Aymeri.
Shopify is best positioned because of the way they innovate. Innovation is not an afterthought, it's the core of the way Shopify is operated. They are very much in tune with their clients and I also think it speaks to their entrepreneurial mindset. They make our success their priority.
International growth on the horizon
Psycho Bunny is looking to expand their physical retail footprint to Europe by 2025 with Shopify. And that means the future is wide open.
“We are actively partnering with Shopify on our retail expansion in Europe,” says Jean-Aymeri. “We have built a strong foundation in North America. Shopify is supporting us around payment fulfillment and regionalisation and we are excited for this market entry.”
Into the great wide open
Jean-Aymeri and the Psycho Bunny team have worked incredibly hard to transform their brand from a small wholesaler into a soon-to-be international juggernaut, where quality is at the heart of everything they do. And they’ve done it with Shopify not just as any old platform but also as a member of their team.
“We are growing and evolving with Shopify, which supports the growth experienced by clients like us, who started small and grew rapidly to become an enterprise,” says Jean-Aymeri. “We feel Shopify gives us a competitive advantage. We feel really optimistic about the future because of the quality of the partnership.”
